Great Kisser (2 page)

Seated quietly with the phone book and a scotch in 1980, I knew how it would hurt my wife if she knew I was doing this, and I never told her.

I did it until I had drunk enough, and fell asleep.

From the time I married her in 1976, Karen gave me a secure perch from which to yearn. I could do it knowing I was lucky, remembering my father's images of poverty and failure and loneliness everywhere. Images he pointed out to me, and which stayed with me always. (“I look at those cripples, and I feel great,” he would say. “Look at that retard.”) I would have died without her. What if the bough broke? My sweet lovely Corie on the kibbutz in Israel when I was 20 (yeah, I didn't fuck her either) sang to me as she poured cherries into my basket, “The last leaf clings to the bough.”

And when I left Julie in New York in 1972, I fell like that last leaf.

Peter Allen died of AIDS. He was like a shooting star those early days at the Bitter End when I came back to New York with Karen and her son Kevin (eight people in the audience and Peter Allen said, “You're so small but so nice”) and at Reno Sweeney, singing songs he'd written of his grandfather, a saddler in Tenterfield, and of Central Park at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. Without mentioning her by name, he wrote—so simply—of his former wife, Liza Minelli: “I married a girl with an interesting face.” I remember his look of terror when he walked through the audience to the stage and his look of triumph when he introduced a new song and the audience rose to its feet; he hopped onto the piano stool, and when they kept applauding, he hopped up onto the piano. There was a sexual subtext, but I never gave a fuck about that. I never met him. I loved him, as I had loved the old vaudevillians at the Palace. Now Peter Allen is in the ground; that farewell song is on my CD player, and there is no way to forget what is lost.

II: Butinsky: Decline and Fall

1990: Dr. Butinsky, my shrink, sat beside me on the sofa and handed me nude photos of a female patient of his. I didn't know what to say. He was a handsome man in his seventies—curly hair, a large, ingratiating, dark and perspiring face, a square, broad body-builder's frame, his Delphic beard and mournful, piercing eyes. Mountainous shoulders like clubs. He had a huge and curiously graceful shape, which had always made me feel protected. And he was a kind and wise man.

But his wife had died six months before after a six-year battle with cancer. And he was cracking up.

The decline had started some time before, but he had been so immense—in his intelligence, his understanding—that it took time for me to recognize what was happening. When he began to fall asleep during a session, which he did increasingly, honest to God, I thought: he has such awesome power, he doesn't even need to stay awake; he can analyze me while asleep. A remarkable gift. But then, of course, came along the sneaky second thought: or can he?

For twenty-five years he was the shrink one dreamt of having. I met him in Boston in 1965 when I was attending college and dodging the draft. I was living with the secret that I had laughed at JFK'S assassination, that was my state of mind, the hate within me. Butinsky didn't even charge me for sessions, making it possible, after graduation, for me to travel to Boston to see him. He was always accessible, day or night.

I left him for two months for that summer in Israel. One day, as I was picking berries high in a tree in the Galilee, he walked towards me, beaming, with his family. He had come to visit me in Israel without telling me. It was like a benediction. I kept seeing him, traveling to Boston by train on weekends, until 1972, when I went to Vancouver to get my graduate degree.

I resumed seeing him in 1978, when I returned from Vancouver, and I kept seeing him, on and off, for another 12 years, with Karen the last 6 years.

To settle in Israel is to make “aliyah,” which means to ascend to something higher. For me, traveling to Boston to see Butinsky was my aliyah. Coming to Boston meant for me walking in the Boston Garden and by the Charles, climbing the winding streets of Beacon Hill and walking along Commonwealth Avenue listening to music wafting from windows, and reading and studying in the Copley Square Library and at Harvard. And then, on Sunday mornings, waiting to see him before my appointment, I would sit in the field (traces of remaining forest and old trolley lines between gnarled branches of trees) near Butinsky's baronial house, smelling the burning leaves in late fall, or sit on benches in winter as the snow fell, or watch the children playing in spring and summer, music spilling from the open windows of the beautiful houses all around me. As the hour came closer, I had a brownie and coffee in the candy store nearby, the sweetness of the brownie a prelude, and then walking over to Powell Street to see the man I loved more than anyone on earth.

But this was 1990, and I was paying the price. He had saved me. But now I needed to save myself from him.

The reversal of roles had begun four years before, when he ushered me and Karen through his massive office door into the actual living room, the magic carpet of his home. He introduced me to his wife and daughter. Teacups, honey cake, the Talmud. What a feeling. A patient's fantasy come to life. For years, I had listened to the happy sounds of his household while sitting in his office, his wife playing the piano or the Boston Symphony playing on his turntable, peals of laughter coming from his daughter. Butinsky would lift his head to the sounds. I had devoured every detail about him from afar, seeing him around Boston, playing basketball with his daughter, bicycling with his wife, cocking his arm for his wife to put her hand through as they entered a theater. That combination of gentleness and strength that would endure as a model for me of how one should live—even if I couldn't do it myself.

Or visiting me summers in Oak Bluffs, this courtly man in white knee socks and shorts, chasing butterflies with a net. I would walk with him, and he would turn our walks into brief therapy sessions, interspersed with bird-watching. Butinsky alert, as we walked, to human grief, a gobbler of life with his Batman card that he gave as his I.D. at stores. This physically mammoth, personally shy man with hooded eyes, his unmistakable Boston accent, came from the ghetto of Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester and loved the streets and parks and alleyways of Cambridge and Boston and Brookline. He once told me he considered himself a hedonist. I wondered what he could have meant: that he ate a lot of plums? I had written some of this in a story I'd published about Butinsky in 1986, a story he showed to all of his patients.

He invited Karen and me to spend weekends. And soon he told us of his wife Beth's lymphoma. He asked me to sit by her bedside with him as he read her Thurber and took care of her with infinite good humor and patience. For the first time, I realized how important my presence had become to him—that he, my therapist, was disappointed if I could not spend the weekend with him. And so when he began to turn the tables and confide in me, at first I felt so special, so privileged and singled out.

Two things he said in those days had a significance I would only later grasp. “My patients become my rescuers,” he told me one day out of the blue on the way to the synagogue. I didn't know what to make of it until a colleague of his confided to me: “He's known for never letting go of his patients.” Shortly after that, Butinsky told me that an essay by Freud had made a lasting impact on him: “Psychoanalysis: Terminable and Interminable.”

And about this time, his generosity had become acute. He had begun moving his most helpless patients into his large home, the homeless, the jobless. One day a blind girl knocked at his door. The young woman was looking for a room. She wore dark glasses. She came by at the suggestion of a patient, Bob Starr, who said she was a witch. Before Butinsky could decide whether to let her stay, the doorbell rang again, and a bunch of people came in and trudged upstairs with boxes of her stuff. He said “Wait a minute,” and she said, “You wouldn't want to be known as a doctor who put a blind girl out on the street.”

“Now I can't get rid of her,” he told me. “She's taking over the house. She has a malign presence, an aura, and a vast network of people who are devoted to her. I told her she had to leave, and a lawyer's letter arrived several days later. It had the same refrain: ‘You wouldn't want a news story that says a noted doctor put a blind girl out on the street.' Even Bob Starr, who used to hate her, comes to see her now. I see him disappearing into her room. He says, ‘She has a way of moving her body.'”

Butinsky paused, and said, “I'm not sure that girl is blind.”

His wife was at a loss to stop the invasion. The patients did small chores, changed light bulbs, unclogged sinks, washed clothes. And then there was me. “Michael,” he said, “you will be my Boswell.” Now I conducted hours of interviews with him for a projected biography, not really listening to the technical details of what he said but basking in the role he had assigned me. Then he suggested that I begin to interview his other patients to better know him by getting to know who he was intent on saving.

And in order to prepare me for these interviews, and to help me better understand his therapeutic skills, he shared tapes with me of his sessions with these patients.

That was a kick.

After his wife's death, he sat with me, wringing his hands: “She slipped through my fingers. My humanity wasn't great enough. That great wall went up, the severance of connection. I saw her face in the coffin. She's lying in the coffin in the cold ground. Why did I fail her? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

“I think: why isn't she coughing? The silence, the loneliness. I was there to save her, to get her tea in the morning, to suffer for her. I could be there in the night when she rang for me. I had been resigned to a life of suffering. For many years she was no longer able to do what a wife did. She kept saying to me: ‘I don't want to live anymore.' But I breathed life into her. Every breath was painful for her. There was great emptiness and loss for me. My life was so taken up with her needs. I could always anticipate her coming home from the hospital. To go beyond condolence to remembrance—a bouquet of remembrance. There had been breath between us. It suddenly stopped. There's such silence in the house. I nursed her for twenty-four hours. She would wet herself from coughing and I would be able to help, to clean her. How could she want to leave me alone?

“She was my patient.

“I don't want to live.”

A year later, Butinsky showed me the naked pictures of his patient/girlfriend: “She wants to be a human skeleton,” he said. “She seeks her greatest bliss. Eats only tofu and vegetarian food. I specialize in borderline cases. Janice is a challenge to me. If I end the relationship, she'll crack up. If I can get her to mature, there's a chance for us.”

“In the long run, you'll get sick of her,” I said.

“Also in the short run,” Butinsky said. “This is the last fling of the rescue fantasy.”

Karen and I sat with Butinsky in front of the TV set hour after hour watching public broadcasting. He was getting frail, he had diabetes and a bad heart, and he didn't want to do much else.

But when I write now that Butinsky has a stroke, or a bad heart, or diabetes, it is not true that I was aware of these things then. Yes, he told me. But I barely noticed. I didn't have space for it. It's only the tapes I listen to now—fourteen years later—really listen to now—and learn what Butinsky was going through. At the time I only knew that I was no longer the center of attention. It really pissed me off.

When I began to bring up recent crises, Butinsky sighed. “You promised me.”

“What?”

“You promised you wouldn't talk about your problems anymore,” Butinsky said.

“I'm thinking of going into psychoanalysis,” I told him.

“I hope you survive it.” Butinsky kept talking. “I was always shy as a young man. My father would say that suffering is the law of life.” Spotting Reagan on the tube, he said, “All therapy is pointless until we get rid of him.”

I cannot forgive him. I cannot be his Boswell. I have to get away. He calls me in New York. “She's pressing charges. She's very bitter. She could wipe me out.” He asks me to call Janice and plead with her to leave him alone. I cannot do it. He keeps seeing patients for some months, but he gets steadily weaker. Then he has another stroke. He tells his daughter, “I think I'm dying,” and he does.

I remember his voice and the gentle way it imparted reason and high expectations for me. In 1965, in 1985, and almost up to the end.

There was a time when for me he was all the radiance of the world. A patient searches for clues about his shrink. For me, in the early days they were the plaque on his wall with a quote from Maimonides: “Here I am preparing myself to engage in this craft. Help me O Lord in this work so that I may be successful.” And the map of Jerusalem on his office wall and his bookshelves lined with the work of Thomas Mann—the writer who embodied the nobility of reason for a generation. When Butinsky lost his mind, I couldn't stand it. Sure, he saved my life, but did he have to go crazy on me? And I lost my love for him for a long time.

III: Vancouver

1970: I remember Vancouver as a dark place. The rain constantly fell. I was a graduate student in creative writing at the university on a fellowship. I lived in a boarding house. The ex-hooker in the room above me told me she heard the clink of my glass as I poured whiskey.

I had fallen off the face of the earth.

The chairman of my department, Bart Stevens, became obsessed with a story I'd written: a very lonely story about New York and a black maid, Willie Mae, who cleaned my room, confided in me, and tried to seduce me. It went back to my earliest college days, before Julie. The story was an early instance of my constant pattern of deflecting all fucks—all opportunities for fucking through sabotage, denial, or flight. At the same time I thought of women 24 hours a day. My cock became huge when thinking of women or even coming near them, and shrivelled to the size of a pea at the thought of intercourse.